In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 Despite the superfluity of information in this book a number of crucial points need clarification. What did Lawrence actually mean when he said, with a wild exaggeration that defied all logic: "I was born hating my father" and "I've never really had a father?" What precisely was the nature of Spencer's influence of Lawrence? (One paragraph mentioning several echoes in Lawrence's works is thoroughly inadequate.) Why did Helen Corke's friend Herbert Macartney kill himself after their holiday together on the Isle of Wright? In exactly what ways did Frieda's children grow up "bearing the scar of their loss"? What did Middleton Murry really mean when he said of Frieda: "No woman ever demanded less to make her happy"? (Murry was just the man to give her less.) In some cases Worthen, for all his ex-cathedra manner, is simply mistaken. He uses "paradoxically" when he means "ironically" (408). He states: "In the hectic muddle and confusion of these days [with Frieda in Metz], Lawrence had one single advantage: he was the only person who knew exactly what he wanted" (402). In fact, all but Frieda knew what they wanted. Weekley, his family and his friends wanted Frieda to come back to him—and so did her children and her parents. Frieda's sisters wanted her to remain ostensibly married while living in her own London flat and leading a completely free life. And Worthen's intolerably arch and completely un-Lawrencean comment—"Bavarian woodcutters are canny, not to say superstitious folk, and probably not susceptible to the charms of upper-class women emerging for rivers" (428)—misses the essential human point: that most vigorous young men would love to have sex with the beautiful Frieda, when she suddenly appeared, wet and naked, and offered herself to him. Jeffrey Meyers Berkeley, California D. H. Lawrence Carol Sklenicka. D. H. Lawrence and the Child. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.191 pp. $27.50 CAROL SKLENICKA^ study of Lawrence's writing and to a lesser degree his life focuses upon his concern with the theme of childhood and his characterization of the child. To the general reader who associates Lawrence with the explicit depiction of sexuality it may come as something of a surprise that Lawrence was preoccupied with childhood in Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, the two novels which are central to this study. Professor Sklenicka cogently argues, however, that Lawrence 256 BOOK REVIEWS made a major contribution to the development of childhood in the modern novel and to our understanding of "what a child means and what it means to be a child." Sklenicka wisely begins with the tradition of the child which Lawrence inherited from the Romantic writers of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Although as she proposes, the child has had a place in literature virtually from its beginning, it was the Romantics under the influence of Rousseau who are primarily responsible for what has been termed the "invention" of the child in the nineteenth century. As most of us know, central to that Romantic tradition of which Lawrence was an heir is the notion of the child as an embodiment of innocence. Lawrence adjusted that notion of the child to his own purposes , as Sklenicka sees them: the depiction of many variations of parenthood and childhood, an interest in very early childhood, a concern with the effects of parenting on male as well as female characters, and finally an understanding of child consciousness "central to his aesthetic opinions and literary achievements." The heart of this study is the three chapters which explore the theme of childhood and child-parent relationships in Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's major work in his early realist style, and The Rainbow, his first great novel in his mature style. Sklenicka's readings of the two novels are perceptive, restrained, and eminently useful, even to those very familiar with Lawrence's work. Although she subscribes to the conventional notion of the Oedipal structure of Sons and Lovers, which she terms "intractably Freudian," Sklenicka examines Paul Morel's relationship with his parents without the psychological finger-pointing so frequently found in...

pdf

Share